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July 17, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:06:23

1955 Freedomain Radio Sunday Show, 17 July 2011

How can we rescue the future from evil, social assistance is for the unlikable, emotions and UPB, and determinism redux!

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	Hi everybody, it's Devan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio.
	July the 17th, 2011 at just after 2 p.m.
	Eastern Standard Time. I hope you're doing very well.
	Just a little introduction.
	I wanted to share the newest on toddler UPB statistics, my daughter.
	We have a thing with her, which I guess many parents do, where...
	If she doesn't listen, like her strategy for not doing what she doesn't want to do is to not listen.
	I'm not going to say where she might have gotten that from.
	I'm certainly pointing, if you see this in the video, you will be seeing the pointing, but there's just no way I'm going to go on audio record as having saying where she might get this from.
	But yeah, so her strategy is to not listen.
	And so what we have decided to do is simply to point out that she's not listening and to remind her that she's free to disagree, but she does have to actually acknowledge that we've spoken as parents.
	Anyway, so this has been going on for a couple of weeks now where, you know, she'll say it's time to wash your hair or it's time to bath or whatever things that she may not want to do.
	She'll just put into her list and we'll say, Isabella is not listening.
	Isabella is not listening.
	That's the statement that we make, which, you know, is reasonable and accurate.
	Anyway, so yesterday, I was, she was in the bath with, Christina was giving her a bath, and I was just passing by in the hallway, and Isabella was talking to me, calling out to me.
	And I had the iPod, either checking email or some geeky stuff like that, because, you know, it's important to keep your work going at all times.
	Anyway, so I turned into the bathroom, and I was sort of standing by the sink, and I was just finishing checking my email, and Isabella continued to be talking to me.
	But then she paused, and she looked at Mommy, and she looked at Daddy, and she said, Daddy is not listening.
	And boy, you just, you can't beat that.
	And I was like, oh, you're absolutely right.
	I'm so sorry. Here we tell you that you really should listen to us.
	And here I am being very rude, checking my email when you're talking to me.
	I'm so sorry.
	How rude of me. I do apologize.
	And thank you for pointing it out.
	And we mentioned that a few times.
	But I just thought that because it's not just the words that she says.
	I mean, it's great that she picks up the moral rule and reflects it back or the politeness rule or whatever.
	But what I just loved about it was the actual tone reproduction.
	Dada is not listening.
	The same way that we say it to her, I just thought that was fantastic.
	So I just wanted to keep you updated on the Easyboo situation.
	But I know we've got a whole bunch of callers stacked up, so I won't lengthen out this introduction.
	I'll maybe do a video later. But thanks, everybody.
	This is the Sunday call-in show.
	Last point, also, if you wanted to join myself and my family and Mark Edge of Free Talk Live and...
	For a cruise to the Bahamas, we're going to be going in November.
	You can go to fdrurl.com forward slash cruise to sign up.
	It's like 700 bones and it should be just a great, great time and I hope that you'll be able to join us.
	So that's my little pitch. Not to forget Liberty Fest New York, September the 10th, lfnyc.com.
	You can go to libertopia.org to check out.
	I'll be doing a lot of speaking at Libertopia on the 23rd, 24th of October in San Diego, California.
	And I also probably will be speaking in Florida.
	I'll post a little bit about that later.
	And I hope that you're having a wonderful week.
	I'll talk to you soon. And so now we turn it over to the listeners.
	Thank you for your patience. Hello.
	Hello. How's it going? Yes.
	Good. Are you talking to me?
	Are you talking to me? Yes, Robert De Niro.
	Please continue. Okay.
	Are we ready? Yes, indeed.
	Okay. If you were to put all the population of this country into a triangle, And you measure the height of that triangle as either being intelligence, enlightenment, knowing, whatever you want to classify it as.
	Only half of that population, the top half, that's only 25% of the population.
	75% is below the halfway mark.
	Now, in history, there has never been a king, a queen, or a tyrannical government that has ever left office Because the top 25% asked them nicely to.
	They always had to be dismissed violently by the bottom half of the triangle, the 75%.
	Now, I've been thinking, it doesn't really matter to me what people want to do with their lives.
	I think their right to swing their fist ends at the end of my nose.
	And if somebody wants to do drugs all day, let them do it.
	If we want to live the way we want to live, is it possible to either buy a small country?
	I'm willing to put $100,000 into this.
	But the problem is if we found a million out of 300 million who were all willing to live a free life, that's $100 billion that we have access to.
	We can buy a small country for that.
	But the problem is, wouldn't we then have the first of our tasks?
	Wouldn't it have to be a very strong military?
	Because if we were prosperous, wouldn't we then be open for attack from all the other tyrannical governments?
	And if we were to choose a state, I don't care what state, but if all the top 25% of the population all wanted to move there, I mean, I'd love taxes to succeed from the Union.
	I think we would have a huge deluge of people asking for Texas citizenship.
	If we were to do that, wouldn't we then be open to invasion from all the other states?
	It doesn't appear as though there really is a solution for this.
	I'd like to hear your comments.
	Great question. So, your basic argument is that we do need to have some sort of either secession from existing status societies or some sort of violent revolution in order to overthrow The tyrannies that beset us, so to speak, and the unfortunate thing is, of course, let's say that we all buy some island and set up a stateless society.
	We need a very strong defense agency because other states may want to come in and pillage, of course, the increasing wealth.
	Plus, also, other states would have the problem of not liking the example of how successful and functional a free society could be because it would put the lie to their own predations.
	Is that a good summation of your argument?
	In the past, though, they've never given up the fight.
	Yeah, they're not going to. There's no question.
	They're not going to give up power and control in a voluntary way.
	There's no question of that. I completely agree with you, for sure.
	What's the solution? Well, the solution is a third way, right?
	Rather than trying to escape the society and rather than trying to use violence to overthrow rulers, there is a third way that I have identified.
	I don't know if I'm the first to identify it.
	It was certainly new to me. But the third way is through peaceful parenting, first and foremost.
	We have to recognize that a multi-thousand-year institution like the state is not going to go away in a small slice of time.
	That's not going to happen.
	And to recognize that is really, really important because otherwise we are tempted to do useless short-term fixes like political action, political arguments, and that sort of stuff.
	And so I think it's really important to recognize that we are looking at getting away, getting rid of an institution that is older in a sense than slavery, although in some ways synonymous with it.
	And those kinds of revolutions Take at least a century.
	Now, usually closer to a century and a half, right?
	So the first women who began to agitate for the legal right to divorce began doing so in the early 19th century.
	Even in Canada, up until quite recently, divorce required a parliamentary decree for a woman, no matter how badly she treated she was by her husband, to escape from her marriage.
	And it wasn't until The 1970s, the 1980s, the 1990s, and in some places even into the 21st century that women gained the legal right of divorce.
	And so that was about 150 years.
	Rights of women, you could look at Mary Shelley, that's the author of Frankenstein.
	She wrote Vindication of the Rights of Women in the early 19th century, I think it was.
	And it wasn't until the mid-20th century that women began to really agitate for and gain political rights and the rights of property and the rights of contract and the rights of independence.
	And even then it took another I mean, child abuse was unrecognized as a phenomenon until really the early to mid-20th century.
	And still now we have a massive amount of space and time and consciousness to cross over in order to deal with the problem of child abuse effectively.
	And the state is bigger than these, in a sense.
	So it's a long-term problem.
	This is an evolution thing.
	If you were to take a pack of dogs and throw a bone amongst the dogs, The dogs wouldn't say, oh, well, I had the bone yesterday.
	I think it's your turn today.
	They wouldn't intellectually discuss who's next in line to have the bone.
	They would all fight to the death to get the bone.
	So, if we did evolve from survival of the fittest, which I think...
	I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I think you may be insulting dogs a little bit.
	Dogs are, I think...
	No, the dogs are well known to share food with the sick.
	Of course, mama dogs will go and get food and bring them back to their children, I mean, or to their pups.
	Birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it.
	So, remember, the animal kingdom has a lot of altruism in it.
	Well, animals never kill for fun, like we do.
	Ants and human beings are the only species that wage war on each other, which is great company to be in.
	Yeah, yeah. But the trouble is, though, is I want it in my lifetime.
	I mean, I understand, but I'm impatient.
	I see the wisdom of what we're discussing.
	And I want to see it now because the bottom 75% would love it too.
	But you have to – see, but what I'm asking you to do is to break from the paradigm of wanting power over others.
	What you fundamentally want is power over those who have power over us.
	And it's as hard for us to give up our – no, because you want to make them go away.
	You want them to make them stop what they're doing or you want to escape them and get out of their clutches.
	You want to – And then you're afraid of them coming after you with weapons and so on.
	But we have to give up the idea even that we have power over those who have power over us.
	That's the great addiction and lure of political action.
	If I vote someone in who agrees with me, the government should be smaller.
	I'm going to find some way to limit the power that the state has over me.
	Look, we have to give up those illusions.
	They don't work. We've been trying them for, I mean, gosh, if you look back to Even Aristotle's work 2,400 years ago looking at trying to control the power of the state, philosophers, intellectuals, economists, and all other types of theoreticians have tried to find ways to limit the size and power of the state since the state was...
	I'm sure the state was created.
	The next day, people are like, okay, how do we limit this?
	And so this has been an experiment that's been going on for thousands of years.
	And I think that it's just time for us to humbly accept that the evidence is in.
	That the evidence is in.
	That there is no way. Because if we say that we can find some way to minimize, control, manage, decline, or crush the power of the state through some sort of political form or some sort of fleeing...
	Then what we're saying is that we are smarter than the combined genius of 2,500 years of really, really brilliant men and women who tried to control the power.
	That we are smarter than the entire founding fathers put together.
	That we're smarter than the entire legion of Greek and Roman philosophers.
	That we're smarter than the entire legion of the Enlightenment philosophers.
	I don't have...
	The intellectual stones to swing that hard.
	I just, I can't look back and say, well, I can figure out or Ron Paul or someone's going to figure out a way to limit the power of the state by using the state despite the fact that 2,500 years of stone geniuses have tried it and failed.
	I just, I can't do it.
	I mean, I'm going to accept the facts that are in there.
	So if we do peaceful parenting, we will grow people who, sorry, if we do peaceful parenting, we will raise children Who are not frightened of authority and who are benevolent and who are peaceful and non-violent and non-aggressive in the way that is destructive and non-criminal.
	So that begins to undermine the entire need for the state.
	The second thing that we need to do is as philosophers and thinkers and libertarians and activists and anarchists and rationalists, we really, really need to ostracize people who support the use of violence against us.
	Ostracism is the most powerful force in human society that, I mean, it's in some ways second only to force at a mere personal level.
	But politically, it is superior to the power of force because the power of force is only supported politically by people who believe that it is moral and necessary.
	In other words, that it is not force.
	And so we need to ostracize the people.
	Because the entire future of free society, at least as I've argued, and I'm certainly not the only one to argue this, is based upon the power of ostracism.
	And so if we believe, or I'm not going to speak for you, I believe That a future society can be very effectively run on the power of ostracism.
	And so I deploy that power to see if it works.
	I mean, if you think you have a surefire cure for a particular illness and you have that illness, then take that illness.
	If you think that you have a surefire way to lose weight and you're overweight, try that way to lose weight.
	And so I've tried to use the power of ostracism within my own life and I have found it to be phenomenally powerful.
	And so ostracism plus peaceful parenting is the way to go.
	It has not been tried before.
	So at least if it doesn't work, it won't be the same mistake and will have ticked – will have crossed something else off the list.
	But I think it has every conceivable chance of working.
	And frankly, I can't see any other way that it can work.
	And that is something you can do without having $100,000 and the capacity to build a society and a military in some new country.
	You can do that in your life.
	You can do that today. You can pick up the phone.
	You can talk to people about the violence of the state, the evils of the drug war, the evils of public schools, the evils of welfare, the evils of Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security.
	This slow, dismal, end of empire collapse of a society based on blood.
	You can do all of that and you don't need anything else other than knowledge and the passion to speak openly and clearly and make your moral judgments real in your relationships.
	That's all you need. And so that's an opportunity that's available to everyone.
	And the fact that people are so hesitant to use it only confirms how powerful.
	Ostracism really is.
	So those are my arguments and I don't think we need another country.
	I don't think we need some magic knight in shining armor to ride into the government and lay waste to its extremities of power.
	All we need is the firmness to act on our convictions that once we have identified evil, I.e., the initiation of force and, in particular, its concentration in the hands of the state.
	Once we have identified evil and we have identified what allows that evil to continue, which is the support and praise of citizens, then we can, instead of attacking the state, we attack the real source of the state.
	The real source of the state, the real source of the power of the state, is not its guns, it is not its taxation, it is not its military.
	It is the belief that it is moral and necessary to have a state.
	That is the only source of its power.
	And we go to the root of the tree of evil.
	We do not trim its branches. We go to the root, which is the belief in those around us that the state is moral and necessary.
	And that's what we do to free ourselves from this.
	And I don't see any other way.
	End of my speech. Please tell me if I'm wrong and where.
	Well, I just don't think the Jews in 1940, even if they did ostracize the The state would have done them any good.
	I mean, they would have been butchered no matter what they did.
	I'm sorry, I'm not sure where you're calling from, but do you feel that you're in a situation, say, two years prior or one year prior to concentration camps and Zyklon B chambers?
	No, what I feel we're very close to is the total economic collapse of this country, which is going to cause...
	Sorry, just to interrupt again, are you calling from the U.S.? Yeah.
	Okay, sorry, go ahead. I believe there's going to be riotous behavior because the state is trying some futile act to control us by making us all subservient to the state and needing the state for our own survival.
	The only thing that I can do to help protect my family is to find some way of isolating or immuning myself From the actions of the state.
	I just want to be left alone.
	I mean, I think everybody is entitled to their version of freedom as long as it doesn't take away the decisions and freedoms from others.
	Like I said, your right to swing your fist ends at the end of my nose.
	You can swing your fist all day long if that makes you happy.
	But when it starts to affect my freedom, then your right to do what you're doing slowly diminishes.
	Right now the state decides what tax we pay, who we have to pay, how much.
	They're never going to give up their income.
	And they don't produce anything.
	As you said before, the only income that the state has is from us.
	Now, I just want to be left alone.
	I feel like I have a right to be left alone.
	As long as I don't interfere with others, there should be no need to knock on my door.
	And I'm sure the Jews, before the Second World War really took effect, felt exactly the same.
	But the states still went into their homes, took their positions, raped their possessions, raped their women, and threw them into concentration camps.
	I don't believe—look, first of all, I don't accept that we are in pre-Nazi Germany times, even in the U.S. Yeah, there's going to be economic hardships.
	There were economic hardships in South America all throughout the 1990s, and we look at what happened to the currency in Argentina— And they did not descend into minority-crushing death camps and concentration camps and so on.
	And you can look all over the world. Those days are largely gone.
	And those days are largely gone as a result of improvements in parenting.
	In other words, I mean, just to give a small anecdote that I've mentioned before.
	The child raising practices in 19th and early 20th century Germany were indescribably brutal.
	I can't imagine a single parent of the day that would not be almost immediately arrested for child abuse if they were to try and do what they did to children.
	I mean, massive beatings and these sort of binding up of infants in cloths that were riddled with lice and so on, right?
	And this is one of the reasons why when Hitler referred to Jews as lice, it had a very powerful and terrifying impact upon the German unconscious because they'd all been gnawed at by lice as a result of just ridiculously destructive parenting habits.
	That kind of parenting is very rare in the world now.
	There has been a huge improvement in the 20th century.
	The rights of children and the rights of women often go hand in hand.
	And as the rights of women have improved, the quality of parenting has improved.
	And I think there's some limitation to that, which we don't have to get into here.
	But the cause of the Nazism was not economic collapses.
	There's been tons of economic collapses throughout the world, throughout history.
	Almost every currency within a generation or two goes through some sort of collapse.
	And remember, America's currency is only 40 years old, right?
	America's currency is only 40 years old because it really can only be counted as the currency that we have now or that you have now.
	After Nixon took the fiat currency or made it into fiat currency by taking the US off the gold standard in 1971.
	So it's only 40 years. It's right on schedule for a collapse.
	But it is not economic collapse that causes the kind of genocidal murderousness that you saw in Germany or that you saw, of course, in China or that you saw in Russia under communism or that you're currently seeing in North Korea.
	To create people who are willing to murder by the millions, you have to brutalize them as children to the point where they have developed almost no empathy, to the point where they are so insane with agony and power lust and hatred of anybody who has any kind of difference.
	That doesn't come about because people lose money.
	You don't fundamentally alter somebody's personality structure because their 401k account goes down by half or three quarters or even 100%.
	You have to breed people to be those kinds of monsters.
	And I think that the breeding pens for those kinds of monsters have largely, thank heavens, been washed away into the bloody sewers of history.
	So my argument would be that an economic collapse in America might be the best thing, rather than a presage to some sort of Nazi horror situation.
	Do you believe the Bilderberg group are planning a strategy against the world?
	I really don't know enough about it.
	I certainly would not be shocked if those who had enormous amounts of power had some sort of plan to maintain and extend that power.
	I have no doubt about that.
	But I don't know enough about the details.
	And I don't really care about the Bilderberg Group or the Trilateral Commission or the Bohemian Grove or any of those things.
	Because those are all symptoms.
	Those are all symptoms. Those people don't have any power unless the majority of people believe the state is moral and necessary.
	And it is that. It's the belief of my fellow slaves that I wish to challenge, not the power that results from it.
	Yeah, I'm not quite as optimistic as you.
	I really feel that we're heading for something of unprecedented disaster.
	Well, in which case, I would understand that you would consider it too late, right, to do anything philosophically?
	You know, like if you're three days away from having a heart attack, there's no point switching from burgers to salads.
	All I can do now is just buy a farm and try and keep out of the way and see what happens.
	You know? Yeah, I mean, I'll just make one last little speech and then we'll move on to the next caller.
	And I appreciate your call. I really do.
	And look, please don't think that what I'm saying is right.
	This is all arguments. This is not stuff that you can prove empirically.
	So these, you know, I could be entirely full of crap.
	But I will say this.
	I will say this, that I do think it's really quite important to remember that if you have the skills to understand all of this stuff, if you have the skills to communicate it, as you obviously do, then I think that you are a doctor in a time of plague.
	And it is... It's not evil for a doctor to refuse to help others in a time of plague, but I think that there is an obligation on the doctor to help if he can.
	I don't think it's too late, and I hope that you will continue to put the right ideas out into the world, because if you flee, there's millions of people in your scenario who are going to be left behind in a terrible situation.
	And, of course, if the right ideas don't come out before the collapse, then there's no chance that they'll come out after the collapse, because the propaganda will have taken over.
	Oh, good. Okay. I just wanted to make that little pitch.
	I'll stay and listen.
	Let somebody else have a go.
	Thank you very much for your time. Thank you.
	Great, great call. I really appreciate that.
	And I'm sure that we both hope that you're wrong.
	But there's no way to know for sure just yet.
	Well, buy gold and silver just in case.
	Thank you. Buy gold and silver just in case and get yourself some food in the basement.
	So, thank you very much.
	Hello? Roger, you're up.
	Hi. Can you hear me? I sure can.
	My name is actually Ryan.
	I'm not Roger Federer. I wish I was that good at tennis.
	What can we do for you? I just have a few questions.
	I read reading Practical Anarchy and it just seems like I've been given some kind of truth.
	I feel like I gotta tell All my friends, right?
	And I was asking my friend, just trying to explain to him some libertarian beliefs, right?
	And I was saying, do you think the initiation of use of force is always wrong?
	And he said, he's saying, his objection was that if a country is killing its own people, he thinks that, I'll say, Canada should step in.
	What do you think about that?
	Well, I think that the answer to that lies in the euphemisms that the man is using, because he's not telling the truth about the situation, because he's saying stepping in.
	Well, Canada is not stepping in.
	Canada doesn't actually have any legs.
	Canada is just a concept, right?
	When you're dealing with somebody who's, and I'm not saying that this person is being false or whatever, they're probably just full of propaganda, you know, they're in the matrix, so to speak.
	But you need to actually break down what is occurring, right?
	Because Canada is not stepping in to help, like someone who's walking down the street, sees some guy beating up his girlfriend and steps in to stop it.
	That's not what happens. What happens in Canada is that The Canadian government threatens Canadians with imprisonment and quite likely rape, of course, in prison.
	They threaten them with imprisonment and torture in order to extract money from them against their will.
	And we know it's against their will because there's taxation involved.
	That's automatically, right?
	That's automatically the case. And then they then use this money to go and, let's say, do these missions overseas or whatever, right?
	But... The reality is that it is the initiation of force against Canadian citizens that matters.
	So the analogy would be something like this.
	Let's say that the Canadian missions overseas are good and they do help people stop being killed and so on.
	I don't believe that's true, but let's just give that argument over because we don't want to...
	You know, we can give every premise but the last one of the argument, if false, we'll still fall.
	Well, that's like saying should people who are in the mafia...
	Who steal from the general population through extortion and threats and all that and who hold and ship sex trade workers against their will and profit from illegal prostitution and run drugs and this and that.
	Should those people give to the United Way?
	Should they give to charity?
	Well, who gives a shit? That's not the question.
	It doesn't matter what happens to the money after it's stolen.
	It doesn't matter whether it's used for good or for evil.
	If you go and rob a bank and you give all the money to Doctors Without Borders, you don't get to have that as a defense, right?
	So it's kind of like you need to look at the core of where the problem is being caused.
	Well, yeah. You don't just look at the last step and say, well, here's a guy with a pencil-thin mustache And a suit so shiny you can shave in its reflection, handing over a check to the United Way, is that good or bad?
	Well, I don't know.
	Where did the money come from? Did he earn it voluntarily and productively?
	Then yeah, give to charity.
	That's a good thing. Did he beat up some grannies and take their retirement money and now he's giving a check to the United Way to launder the money?
	Well, that's not good, right?
	So yeah, you don't just look at the last step and say, is this good or bad, right?
	You have to look at the whole context, right?
	Can I ask you another question?
	I'm not sure. Of course.
	Just basically, how do you...
	How do you go on living in...
	You live in Canada, right?
	How do you?
	How do you go living in a status society when you're You're totally against it.
	It's kind of a tough thing to know that everything that you've been taught and that you're living in is immoral.
	How do you go about doing that?
	I view it as a blessing.
	I view it as a blessing.
	I think that to be born in a situation of near universal immorality And to have the ability and the opportunity to resoundingly cry your moral truths to the very heavens and have them bounce off the TCIP stratosphere all over the world is an unbelievable opportunity for great courage,
	great honor, and great virtue.
	I'm not thankful that there is a state But I'm thankful, enormously thankful, that I'm able to do what I can do in the situation that we are in.
	I am a born fighter in many ways.
	And, you know, in a sense that I don't really look for fights.
	They sort of look for me, right?
	But I consider it a great honor to be able to Add my voice to the chorus of people crying out for peaceful solutions to social problems.
	So I think you can look at it as a great opportunity.
	As a great opportunity.
	Every... Hero of every movie that we've ever seen has a terrible foe to overcome.
	And it is through the existence and overcoming of that terrible foe that he becomes who he is.
	That he becomes the hero.
	What's Luke Skywalker without the Death Star?
	Just a weirdly gay with good hair in the middle of a dusty bowl farmer, right?
	Yeah. What is Han Solo without the Empire banning smuggling?
	He's just going to be a really discontented accountant.
	What is St.
	George without the dragon? Who is Frodo without the ring?
	Well, he's just a fat little hobbit.
	One more thing. I have a question.
	I was talking to my dad about this kind of stuff.
	He's from Iran, actually.
	I find it, I feel like a spoiled brat just saying, complaining about for life, like I'm saying, there's no, there's not freedom here.
	When he came from a country where it's a heck of a lot worse, you know?
	And I feel like...
	Yeah, he comes from a country where they have morality police with sticks going up and down the street beating women who were showing a little bit of forehead, right?
	Yeah, and it's just, it seems like I'm whining about when...
	Nothing when people are living in a lot worse governments, you know what I mean?
	Right. Well, but the argument for that, right, is to say that you have to wait until you get lung cancer to rail against smoking, right?
	The whole point of railing against smoking is to prevent people from getting lung cancer, right?
	To prevent people from getting sick.
	You don't have to weigh 400 pounds before you become passionate about nutrition and exercise, right?
	You should become passionate about nutrition and exercise in order to avoid becoming 400 pounds, right?
	So the fact that We live in a more free society than most in the world, which I fully attest to and fully guarantee, means two things.
	The first thing is it means we better work damn hard to make sure we don't turn into those other kinds of countries.
	And that takes a particular kind of passion.
	And the second thing is we have an even greater obligation to advance the cause of human freedom because we can do so with relatively little risk compared to these poor bastards in the Middle East, right, who are facing tear gas arrests, imprisonment, executions, as has happened in Yemen.
	Those people are facing some significantly high costs to fight against tyranny.
	The costs that we face in the West are relatively low and therefore I think it's really up to us because we have so many fewer negative consequences to broadcast as loudly and passionately so that we can get ideas across to them because I guarantee you that I know that I've got Middle East listeners because they write to me and give me updates from time to time.
	They're hugely appreciative of what I'm doing.
	They can't do it. They can't do it.
	But I can. And it's a hell of a lot easier for me to do it than they have.
	Like thousands of times more courage than I will ever need in my life.
	And because I'm in a safer environment, I can sing the song of truth and reason and freedom all the louder.
	And I feel that it's my obligation to do so because of my relative security.
	This last thing, and I'll shut up.
	What do you think about...
	I'm not sure what the proper term is, but I guess left-wing anarchy.
	What do I think of left-wing anarchy?
	I think it's more a psychological problem to be solved than an intellectual structure to be analyzed.
	What do you mean by that?
	Sorry, that's completely not clear.
	Not clear at all.
	I'm no expert on left-wing anarchy, and if there are left-wing anarchists out there, then, you know, please tell me, you know, we'll do a show together and tell me where I'm wrong.
	So with that caveat in place, I will tell you briefly what I understand about and listen, what I understand about left-wing anarchy and the objections that I have with it.
	Left-wing anarchy is...
	The idea that you should have no state and you should also have no property rights except perhaps in personal items.
	And this, I view to some degree, the Venus Project is along this, anarcho-syndicalism is along these lines as well.
	So it's the idea that there should be no government, but there should also be no private property.
	And, of course, the famous Prudhomme's famous statement that property is theft, which anybody who repeats that as a support of anarchism is clueless about what Prudhomme actually meant.
	What he meant was that state property is theft, or the property that has been stolen from indigenous peoples is theft, not if you plant a tree and you harvest some apples that you're stealing apples from Space aliens or something.
	But yeah, so the idea is that you do not have a property and you do not have the state.
	And I just think that that is...
	To me, that is an almost perfect description of childhood, right?
	And this is sort of what I feel.
	And this is just a feeling. I'm not going to say this is the proof, right?
	This is just my sort of approach to it.
	So if you just look at the Venus Project, right?
	The Zeitgeisters. What they want is...
	For there to be a society where other people take on the responsibilities of production, i.e.
	robots and their programmers and all that.
	And they live in this perfect round city and robots bring them whatever they want to eat and play with and so on and they are taken care of.
	And this to me is simply early childhood.
	This is just an early childhood fantasy, right?
	So you live in a round area Well, that's a womb, right?
	And machinery gives you all of your nutrients.
	Well, that, of course, is your mother's body and the fallopian tube and so on.
	And you can live a life of carefree abandon and play and you may have to work or you may not have to work and so on.
	That is the fantasy and the ideal, really, I think, of early childhood.
	And if you didn't get these things...
	Either in the womb or as a baby and a toddler, then you're going to have a great yearning for these things.
	You're going to have a great yearning for some external system or environment that is going to recreate the good childhood that you didn't have.
	And this is fundamental, I think, to just about every piece of political philosophy in the world, hopefully except for the sort of anarcho-capitalist philosophers.
	But there's, you know, politics is all about getting unmet needs met through the state.
	And the unmet needs are childhood needs, are childhood needs, right?
	So people who grew up with insecure childhoods have a lowered capacity to handle risk.
	And so they feel that they need external resources available to them if something goes bad in their life.
	And if things go bad in the lives of people who are raised mentally, In abusive environments because of a variety of reasons that I've talked about in my bomb in the brain series, FDRURL.com forward slash BIB. And so people who can't hold down jobs really feel the need for unemployment insurance.
	And people who alienate their children or who don't feel comfortable asking their children for stuff want Social Security.
	And people who don't develop supporting networks in their lives, like the friendly societies that used to exist, they need welfare and Medicare and Medicaid and all these kinds of things.
	And so, to me, the government as a whole is simply a primitive and brutal way for people to attempt to get unmet childhood needs met through The power of politics.
	And I think that is truly tragic.
	And this is why I say it is self-knowledge that is going to release us from the fantasy of the state.
	What are people really trying to do when they want political solutions?
	Is they're trying to avoid the pain of dealing with what was missing in their childhood by recreating an environment that substitutes The state or the robots or whatever for what mommy and daddy should have done and mommy and daddy didn't do.
	And that's really tragic. And you need to deal with the pain that mommy and daddy, if they didn't do what they were supposed to do, that they didn't do it.
	And stop trying to stuff this all up with political stuff.
	So to me, no property and no government is the idyllic ideal of childhood.
	Children really don't understand property in the abstract.
	They're allowed to have their own little property, right?
	And in most... Left anarchist environments, you're allowed to have your own personal property.
	And so you're allowed to have your own personal property, just the same way that a child who's holding a rattle is allowed to continue to hold that rattle, but they don't own the house or the environment or anything like that.
	So I think it's just, it's primitive, it's a primitive attempt to try to create an environment where your unmet childhood needs are going to be met.
	And that's sort of my, you know, a complete amateur psychological assessment of the situation.
	And the last thing I'll say is this, is that People have a fundamental misunderstanding about what goes on in the welfare state and in social security.
	Let's just take retirement.
	People think that retirement is for poor old people.
	It's the retirement benefits of poor old people.
	That is not true. That is simply not true.
	Social security is not for poor old people.
	Welfare is not for poor people.
	Unemployment insurance is not for poor people.
	Because there have been poor people throughout history who have been well, well taken care of in their lives.
	I have a neighbor whose mom, I guess the grandmother of the kids, his mom lives with them.
	And she's got no worries about where her next meal is going to come from.
	And I assume that's because she provides value and love and security to the family.
	And so they want to care about her.
	And people who come across hard times, who run across hard times, if they have developed social relationships, if they're liked and treasured and loved within whatever social organization they're part of, a family, a church, a business association, Toastmasters, whatever, right?
	If you're liked and productive and positive and helpful and generous and wise and good and concerned in your community, then when you come across hard times, Your community will help you.
	So it's not old people who are poor who need social security because they would gain the security that they need from their social groups because they had spent a lifetime giving and contributing within their social environment and therefore I genuinely believe most people get that reciprocity and want to help them.
	No. Government programs are for people that people don't like.
	Not for people who are poor.
	This is a really, really important thing to remember.
	If I was unable to work, I know that there's lots of people who would help me out around the world.
	I get these offers all the time and I really appreciate them.
	That's really important. I am relatively well-liked and what I do has a value to hundreds of thousands of people, which is great.
	And so, yeah, people will help me out.
	They do help me out because they donate and support what it is that I'm doing.
	And if there's no social security when I get older, you know, my daughter, hopefully I'll have saved the money, but if for whatever reason I haven't, I'm sure that my daughter will be happy to help me out because she'll want me around, she'll find me of value, she'll love me, I love her and all that kind of stuff.
	And so if you look at people, right, so you have the choice to have kids or not, right?
	So if you don't have kids, then you save about a quarter million dollars per child because that's what it costs to bring a kid to sort of age 18 these days.
	And so let's say you don't have two kids, well, you get half a million dollars extra in your life.
	Now, if you invest that, you have more than enough money to retire on.
	If you don't have kids and don't invest that money but rather spend it, well, then too bad, right?
	Don't have kids, but you're really helpful with other people's families and other people's children and you contribute to your community, then you will have people who will help you when you get old because you've wound yourself in to that social fabric.
	But if you have kids and you drive them away or alienate them because you've just been a crappy, selfish, brutal parent, well then, yeah, they're probably not going to want to help you out too much when you get older, right?
	And so those are the people who most clamor for social security.
	People who have...
	Either not formed or who have destroyed and alienated their supporting social relationships.
	They're the people who desperately need government assistance.
	It's people that other people don't like.
	And so if you've had a couple of kids and for whatever reason you end up poor in your old age, then your kids will help you out because they love you, because they want you to be happy.
	In the same way that I lavish money on my daughter and time and attention because I absolutely love her and think she's just the best thing since sliced bread.
	And it's not a sense of obligation, it's just a genuine pleasure.
	So it's important to remember that, you know, government hires, right?
	Public sector workers are for workers that the private sector doesn't want to hire because they're entitled or lazy or aggressive or weird.
	Social Security retirement benefits are for old people that nobody likes.
	Unemployment insurance is for people who've lost their jobs who nobody likes.
	I'm not saying everybody dislikes them.
	It's just that they haven't formed those bonds that are supposed to be there to support you in times of trouble.
	Or it's for people who've been lazy and spendthrift.
	They've just blown all the money that they would have otherwise should have saved.
	And so, but even if you've blown all the money, if you've at least been nice to people, let's say you've blown all your money on buying gifts for your nephews and nieces, then there's no way that your community is going to let you slide into homelessness if you're old.
	So I just want to think that's really, really important when it comes to looking at government programs.
	They're instituted and demanded.
	They're instituted for and demanded by people that nobody likes.
	And so the criteria for government programs is that you're an unlikable person, not that you're poor.
	And I hope that makes some sort of sense.
	Yeah, it reminds me of my sister, someone no one likes.
	Right, so if you have a sister that no one likes, right?
	And look, I have some, I guess, had some friends like this who didn't get involved in other people's lives, right?
	Their friends would have kids. And they'd maybe go over once or twice and bring a sort of toy or whatever, but they never sort of said, oh, you know, I'll be happy to babysit, give you guys a break, or whatever, right?
	I mean, they just, they don't get involved in other people's lives.
	They don't gain the real pleasures of winding themselves in, like two trees or many trees growing together.
	They don't take the pleasure of winding themselves into other people's lives.
	They're stingy and alienated and they just want to keep to themselves and they'll do a little bit of stuff, but it's kind of selfish overall.
	Yeah, well, those people feel that they need something, some sort of support when they get older, but that's because they're not particularly likable, not because they're poor.
	Alright, well, thank you so much for answering my questions.
	I really appreciate it. Yeah, sorry for the big speech.
	I hope it was... No worries.
	Let's have a chance to talk to you about things.
	Okay, bye. Up next is, and I'm probably going to murder your name, Eugen.
	Yeah, so my name is Owen.
	It's a Gaelic spelling.
	So yeah, it's nice to talk to you, Stefan.
	Nice to chat with you too. Hey, you've got a nice voice and you've got a nice microphone.
	You wouldn't perhaps be in the profession, would you?
	I'm not. No, I'm not at all, actually.
	But I am from quite near Athlone, actually.
	Oh, really? How's the old side going these days?
	Not too great, actually. No, indeed.
	Well, first of all, I have no children of my own at the moment.
	But I plan to have children in the future.
	But maybe you've had this question before.
	So the question is, if you're a child, Isabella is under the supervision of somebody else and that other person kind of slaps your child, kind of uses force, how will you react to that and how do you think Isabella will react to that?
	Well, that's a great question.
	First of all, to the very, very best of my ability, I would not allow her to be in the environment of somebody who hit.
	Right? So that's sort of the first thing, right?
	I mean, I would really, really double and triple check and any potential babysitters I would cross-examine, you know, with a flashlight and rubber gloves to make sure that they understood that there was to be no raised voices and no...
	Aggression against my daughter.
	She has playmates, of course, that she plays with.
	And we make sure, of course, that there's no aggression.
	There have been a few times where she's experienced aggression from other children.
	So we take her to gymnastics.
	And we took her last year and we're taking her again this year.
	And there was a girl who pushed her.
	And, you know, she jumped up.
	She turned around and she said, girl, don't push me.
	I was like, yeah, good for you, right?
	And so I said to the girl, please don't push.
	I said to the mom, can you please make sure she doesn't push my daughter and so on.
	And then we talked about it afterwards.
	And she, like most kids, she takes a number of times to go over things emotionally to sort of understand what happened and why.
	And So, we tried to explain that the girl was younger than Isabella.
	She was probably just excited that she wasn't being aggressive, that she was probably just wanted to get to where Isabella was and was moving her out of the way the way you'd move a pillow out of the way or whatever.
	And I think that was true.
	That was the case. So, on a very few times, she has experienced some sort of aggression.
	I think most of it inadvertent.
	And so, yeah, she's very, I can tell you, she is very assertive about her space.
	And she is very, she has a very wide, this is true of Christina as well, she has a very wide sense of personal space.
	I don't have a hugely wide sense of, but you know, some people like, you can kind of go up to them, like the close talkers in Seinfeld, and they're not particularly bothered.
	Other people don't like you within 10 feet of them.
	So when it comes to strangers, she has a pretty wide sense of personal space.
	And so she's very proactive at maintaining that space.
	And she is very assertive when it comes to any kind of aggression around her.
	And that, I think, comes from a number of things.
	It comes from the fact that she's certainly allowed to correct me, that I will apologize to her at least once or twice a day just for various little things like I do that are not ideal or whatever.
	And so she has that.
	We've had disagreements.
	It's kind of funny. I won't get into the whole details.
	But we had disagreement about the color of a car in a cartoon.
	I could have sworn it was yellow and Isabella was very firm That it was blue.
	And we talked about this.
	We were out. We talked about this off and on for like half a day.
	And I was so absolutely convinced that it was yellow that I was like, okay, we'll see.
	I'm not even going to argue with you because we'll see who's right and who's wrong.
	And then we came home and I couldn't believe it.
	The car was blue and I was wrong.
	And so I'm like, oh, you're absolutely right.
	And I said, who was right? She said, Isabella.
	I said, who was wrong? Dada, right?
	And so the fact that she's right and I was wrong, I thought was great.
	I mean, I think that's fantastic.
	So, the fact is that she, if she does, I can't imagine what she would do if she was hit.
	I mean, or if anybody yelled at her.
	I just, I can't imagine that.
	But I do know that if anybody touches her when she doesn't want that person to touch her, she's very clear and very firm.
	And she's not, she's not, she's assertive.
	She's not aggressive. She doesn't sort of scream at the kids or whatever, but she's very firm.
	Like, I don't like that.
	Don't touch Isabella.
	And I think that's fantastic because that's, you know, when she expresses her preferences to us, we take them very seriously.
	She has every right to her preferences.
	In fact, she has more right to her preferences than I do to mine because she's not in a situation of voluntarism and she can not achieve the things that she wants to in the way that I can.
	So I hope that helps.
	How would you prepare a child for that situation if possible?
	For being hit? Well, yeah, like, not, like, yeah, slap.
	Say it's even in the supervision of an aunt or an uncle, and maybe they don't have the same beliefs.
	Like, how? No, but I shouldn't, I mean, that is the price of spending time with my daughter.
	Is that people can't yell and hit her.
	I mean, if that ever would have happened, we would just take her out of that environment, and I can't imagine what would have me put her back in that environment.
	How do you feel, like, about self-defense classes?
	Well, I mean, if she's interested, I guess she could.
	I just... I don't think they're particularly necessary.
	I don't think she's going to operate in an environment where those things are going to be necessary.
	I think that... I mean, to me, you know, I mean, I understand the sort of health benefits of judo and karate and all that sort of stuff.
	But, I mean, I think that it's sort of nonsense when it comes to self-defense.
	I mean, where people really need self-defense for the most part if they're being aggressed against is within their own family and they can't do that.
	And I think that, I don't think she's going to need those.
	I think that there's just a kind of implicit training that you have.
	When it comes to children, which is if you respect their wishes and their preferences and try to accommodate them wherever possible and don't squelch their assertiveness, then I think they'll be perfectly fine in this life, or at least as fine as you can be.
	Now, she may see a child hit another child or something like that at some point, but certainly none of her playmates are at all aggressive.
	In fact, the playmates that she has who are older, the only thing they get tired of is Carrying her around because she's a real lap cat as far as that goes.
	But yeah, that's – I just – A, wouldn't put her in that kind of environment and B, if she ever were exposed to that kind of environment, I would simply take her out of it.
	I would apologize to her enormously.
	I would apologize to her enormously for putting her in that environment because that would be my responsibility.
	She doesn't choose her environments.
	I do. And so that would be my fault and my responsibility to apologize to her for and to tell her, of course, that it was completely wrong, but that the wrong lay with me.
	The wrong lay with the person who yelled at her hitter, but the wrong, even more fundamentally, would lay with me as the duty to protect.
	And in that situation, have you ever, or could you ever, like, discuss it with the adult and convince the adult of your beliefs or...
	I certainly wouldn't take that risk, right?
	I wouldn't take that risk because I know how if somebody's willing to hit a child, I mean, you know, I mean, if I'm, you know, if I'm just sort of playing with her and she's across my lap or whatever, and I sort of think, I've thought about occasionally, like, I guess some parents will actually, you know, slap their child's rear end, you know, it is hitting.
	We like to use a euphemism called spanking, but it is hitting.
	Yeah, of course. They will hit their child on a sensitive and tender area of the body and cause pain to the point where the child will cry and sob and sometimes be unable to draw a clean breath.
	That is such a foreign mentality to me.
	That if somebody did hit my daughter, I would never imagine that a mere conversation with me would undo whatever weird, unprocessed trauma was driving them to hit that child.
	And so, you know, if somebody did hit and they said to me, oh my goodness, I can't believe I yelled at or I hit your child.
	I'm going to go into anger management.
	I'm going to go into therapy. I'm going to deal with all of this.
	I'm, you know, I don't expect you to trust me, but I can vow to you.
	It's never going to happen again. I'm going to take whatever steps are necessary to make sure it doesn't happen again.
	Well, I would respect and honor that person for the maturity and responsibility that they were taking.
	And I would let them do that therapy for six or 12 months.
	And then we would have another conversation and I would ask them how it was going and so on.
	And then I would ease them back into it with me being present if it was a relationship that I really wanted to keep.
	But yeah, I would not just trust and say, oh, that's unusual for me.
	I won't ever do that again. It's like, well, okay.
	But I can't trust, right?
	Because the person would have had to have committed to me that they wouldn't do that in the first place.
	And so they already have broken one commitment to me at the expense of my child.
	I don't have the right to put my child in an environment where they're going to be aggressed against, and I just don't have that right.
	But can you tell me why these questions are important to you?
	I mean, I think they're great questions.
	I just want to make sure that if there's something personal about it, if you could let us know.
	No, absolutely not, I would say.
	Just because I'm in the probably near future, I will probably have kids.
	I would fully believe in your kind of principle.
	It's the same. Look, if you get married, sorry to interrupt, but if you get married and somebody hits your wife, what, are you going to go around to a dinner party next week as well?
	Yeah, yeah. I kind of believe that as an adult, if I take a crayon and write something on the wall, another adult is not going to slap me.
	So I just think it's terrible, so terrible that we would slap a child for doing that, like a poor defenseless child.
	I just think it's crazy.
	And yeah, for that reason, I think you're spot on in your beliefs, I think.
	I appreciate that.
	And of course, it is my hope and my goal that people understand that the people who have the most right to be protected from the non-aggression principle are children.
	And that's where it has to start.
	All right. Listen, I'm sorry. We've got a bunch more callers.
	So if you've got enough of an answer, if not, please give me a shout by email or whatever, but I should probably move on if that's all right.
	Yeah. Thank you. Thanks a lot.
	All right. Thanks, man. Bye-bye. Thank you for your patience, everybody.
	I'm so sorry. We're being swarmed by brilliant and wonderful callers today.
	So thank you, everyone, who's taking the time to call in.
	And next we have... Hey, Steph.
	How's it going? It's going great.
	How are you doing, man? I feel nervous. It's the first time I've called into the show.
	Well, ah, boop.
	All right, I'm better.
	Good. Lower the standards at all times.
	Yeah, I couldn't go any lower. So, I had a question about feelings and UPB. Alright.
	I was wondering if you would say that all feelings are UPB in the context of the perception from which they originate.
	I want to make sure I understand what you're saying, so if you can just break that out a little more.
	In other words, when we're aware of the perception that led to a particular feeling, I was wondering if you think it always turns out that the feeling was just and UPB in response to the reality that we perceived, or whether you thought some feelings are unjust or non-UPB even in the context of the thought that preceded them.
	Can you give me, I just want to, because abstract stuff makes my head hurt.
	If you could just give it to me in a sort of practical example, that might help.
	And I think it's a great question, so I don't want to, and I think I understand it, but I just want to make sure.
	Well, and it was kind of a tough question for me to formulate, too, so I may not be doing it justice, but...
	That's all right. No, we can take a minute.
	I think it's a great question. I'm a complete swing-in-the-puss spandex slut for UPB questions, so I'm all for that.
	But if you can just think of a more practical example, then I want to make sure I really understand it as best I can.
	Okay. Well, say that I offer my friend a cookie and then he experiences anger.
	And, you know, assuming he isn't diabetic or something and by offering him a cookie I'm torturing him.
	But in the context of that situation in the present, I think his feeling of anger would be irrational because he's not being aggressed against in that situation or manipulated by me.
	Right. So, yeah, obviously I can see that.
	Go ahead. So, yeah, so if the only cognitive experience that he was having was me offering him the cookie, then I think his feeling would be irrational kind of in and of itself.
	But if we know that feelings are always UPB, then we can kind of automatically conclude that me offering him the cookie is kind of absolutely not the cause of his anger, and then we could look for further evidence of its roots, if that makes sense.
	Right. So I'll just give you an example if we can just switch it a bit and let me know if this still fits within the paradigm that you're talking about.
	So the example would be you offer me a popsicle and I get irritable because, I don't know, I have sensitive teeth and I haven't gone to the dentist and it's reminded me that I need to go to the dentist and I haven't been to the dentist in years and I get all tense about it because I don't have enough money or I'm terrified of the dentist and so I get annoyed at you for bringing up all this crap within me.
	But, of course, all you're doing is offering me a popsicle.
	Does that sort of make sense? Yeah, yeah, I think that fits with what I'm saying.
	Well, you know, it does it.
	Well, yeah, like, so you feel frustration.
	The frustration, I think, it kind of makes sense that...
	Well, okay, so you feel anxiety because you don't like going to the dentist.
	So, I mean, that fear, I guess, kind of makes sense.
	And then you get frustrated.
	I guess, why are you getting frustrated?
	I could end up angry.
	Well, I would get angry because I've been meaning to go to the dentist, but I just haven't because I've been giving in to my fear.
	And so the fact that you're offering me something...
	That I want, that I can't eat because I haven't gone to the dentist or whatever, I haven't started brushing with Sensodyne or whatever, then that just makes me annoyed because it reminds me of what I'm avoiding.
	It reminds me of not having self-care, and that may remind me of whatever happened in my childhood that would lead me to not have self-care and so on.
	Yeah, and I guess what I was saying too is, so if you go back to a situation, say in your childhood, where...
	I guess in some way, there was some sort of non-UPB action that took place, maybe between you and your parents, like a rule they imposed on you or something that wasn't UPB, and then you felt anger, and so then you feel anger in the present moment.
	I mean, that anger in the present moment is sort of a just response to the situation that took place in the past.
	Right, right, right. So, for instance, if my mom was like a real clothes horse and was very, very careful about her appearance, but she always dressed me like some sort of hobo, then that might be something that would be, you know, historically disturbing or annoying for me or whatever, right?
	Yeah, right, right.
	Okay, now let me just sort of break this down a little bit, because UBB, for those who don't know, sorry, is an acronym for universally preferable behavior.
	It's a theory of ethics that I've been, I guess, promulgating for the past couple of years, and it's available for free.
	As a book, audio book and PDF at freedomainradio.com forward slash free.
	You can pick it up there.
	And it's a way really of just insisting that any statements regarding universally preferable behavior be logical and consistent and empirical.
	So I don't believe that UPB would specifically apply to emotional interactions.
	Now, what I mean by that is not to say that we shouldn't have any opinions about what's better or worse when it comes to emotional interactions.
	But UPB is specifically really about violence, about the initiation of force.
	And that, I think, is really important to understand.
	So, to me, if somebody's rude to me, I obviously don't get to shoot them, right?
	If somebody snaps at me and says, I can't believe that you would offer me this popsicle, I mean, that's just crazy, right?
	I mean, that's kind of rude, but I wouldn't get to...
	Blow them away, right?
	We accept that, right?
	Yeah, and I'm kind of wondering if just by our nature you wouldn't actually ever experience that sort of intense rage or anger towards someone offering you a popsicle, that if you're experiencing those strong feelings, what I'm asking is, are those just feelings in the context that's actually precipitating them, like the perception in your mind?
	Well, what I'm sort of circling back to before we get to whether they're just or appropriate or whatever, is that these would not fall under UPB. Let's say that emotional politeness or interpersonal consideration is called aesthetically preferable actions.
	They're different from UPB. UPB is actually enforceable, right?
	So universally preferable behavior is like the non-initiation of force.
	They are actually enforceable, which is why if someone's running at you with a knife, you get to shoot them, hopefully, in the kneecaps and not be considered a bad guy because UPB supports violence in terms of self-defense because it is a response to the initiation of force.
	UPB does not rationally support shooting people for being late, right?
	So you say, all right, I meet you at 7 o'clock.
	Some guy shows up at 8. You don't get to shoot him.
	Right? Because what he's doing is not being violently inflicted upon you, and it's something that you have a choice to avoid, right?
	Because you can simply avoid making arrangements to meet with someone who's continually late.
	You may drop them from your circle of friends, or you may fire them if they're an employee, but they're not imposing things on you in the same way that some guy running at you with a knife is going to impose something on you.
	So, UPB... And I know I'm just...
	Tossing out a lot of conclusions.
	You can go to the book or the podcast or the videos or the articles.
	I've got tons of resources around UPB. So I know I'm not making the arguments.
	I'm simply putting out the conclusions.
	But UPB would say that, yeah, honesty is better than falsehood.
	Honesty is better than falsehood because anybody who says that falsehood is better than honesty is making a true statement.
	That they believe in. In other words, they're contradicting their own argument by the way that they're arguing it.
	So yeah, UPB would say that not yelling at people unjustly is better than yelling at people unjustly.
	But it would not say that you have the right to use force against such people.
	So it doesn't fall into UPB. It falls into aesthetically preferable actions.
	In other words, it's better if people are on time, but you still don't get to use force against them for being late.
	So as far as your relationship with this theoretical person goes, if they start yelling at you because you offer them a popsicle, that is clearly not the way to behave.
	It's not the way to do things.
	And you can test that very easily by yelling at them for something irrational and seeing whether they applaud or are hurt by your actions and doubtless they will feel upset by it and would prefer that you didn't do it.
	Extrapolating that to universality gives you aesthetically preferable actions.
	So, yeah, I think honesty is better.
	I think not blaming other people for innocent things that they're doing because you have emotional issues is certainly preferable, but it doesn't fall into UPB because you cannot use force to enforce it.
	Yeah. Maybe where I'm feeling kind of confused, too, is I'm talking about feelings and I'm kind of conflating them with UPB, but UPB is about behaviors and feelings are not behaviors, but they're responses.
	And so maybe it's...
	I still feel a little foggy.
	Yeah, we can control our behaviors because morality must be something to do with control.
	Because if you can't control something, then you can't be morally responsible for it, which is why if somebody spits on me while they're having an epileptic attack, I don't get to throw them in jail for, I don't know, spittle assault or something like that.
	And so we can't control our feelings.
	We can control, for the most part, our actions.
	And so if I feel this irrational anger, I can't judge myself negatively for that, but I can certainly judge myself negatively or positively based upon what I do.
	With that anger. So, yeah, you're right.
	It's really around the actions more so than the peeling.
	Well, and do you think that we could assume that if you feel anger that's irrational in the present context, can you assume that that anger is just in some other context?
	And so what would be important is then to figure out kind of the cognitive process that preceded the anger and discover where that anger kind of was rational in your history?
	Yeah, I mean, I'll give you an example from when I was much younger that I think will fit in and tell me if it does or doesn't fit in with what you're saying.
	And many, many years ago when I was in theater school, I was cast, typecasting of course, as a Balinese fisherman in a play.
	And I was supposed to propose to a woman as a Balinese fisherman.
	And of course, being a method actor, I did lots of research on Bali and even learned some of the local language in order to play this part.
	And I was supposed to offer this woman a fish.
	In order to get her to marry me.
	And so the woman that I was living with at the time, who was also an actress, we spent some ridiculous amount of time creating a fish that was pretty cool.
	It was made of cloth and cardboard and all that and painted and all.
	It was a pretty cool fish. And I brought it in and the director didn't like it.
	And I just ended up getting a real fish from a fish market to To do it, she didn't like it.
	She thought it looked kind of silly and, you know, it wasn't a real fish and, you know, it was a pretty naturalistic play.
	And I got really hurt and upset by this because I was, I don't know, 20 or whatever and still quite, if not very immature emotionally.
	And was it rational for me to get upset?
	I didn't yell at the director or anything, but I was just really hurt and upset and it took me like a day or two to get over it.
	And was it rational for me to be upset because I put the work in?
	Well, I just suggested it to the director and she said go for it and I tried it and it didn't work out.
	I should have obviously done a sort of conceptual model or said here's what I want to do and all of that.
	But I didn't have those skills at the time.
	I didn't know how to negotiate like that.
	And so I went off and did a whole bunch of stuff and then came back and it was rejected and so on.
	And of course this had to do with my family in terms of not feeling appreciated, not feeling like I knew what the parameters were, not feeling that I was understood and not feeling visible and so on.
	So these feelings of hurt and upset went back to my family.
	They were being played out in this little interaction about a play.
	And that I think is closer.
	Yeah, I think any feelings of anger that feel irrational I believe have true roots and are a true response to some other situation.
	It's just emotionally easier to pretend it has something to do with what's going on in the moment.
	Right. Yeah, and I kind of had one more question, but I know you got a lot of callers, so just cut me off if you need to.
	But, so, I was thinking maybe what I was, because I was trying to make this connection between UPB and feelings, and maybe closer to what I was wondering is, If you think that our feelings would kind of naturally respond rationally to the ethics of UPB, you know, assuming that we weren't dealing with psychological defenses.
	Well, yeah, absolutely.
	I genuinely see...
	Yeah, our deepest feelings tend to be pretty universal in my experience.
	So I think that our feelings very strongly support...
	So for instance, people are generally pretty horrified by rape.
	And as it turns out, rape is completely contradicted by any rational theory of ethics that conforms to the sort of UPB standard.
	The same thing is true with things like murder, and the same thing is true of things like theft and assault and all these kinds of things.
	So that which tends to be common throughout emotionally developed Systems of ethics, right?
	Because all ethics systems that we have received from history are emotionally developed.
	They're not developed through philosophy because the philosophy of ethics has remained pretty irrational throughout most of human history.
	So yeah, we know that emotions accord with UPB in their deepest sense because emotionally generated ethical systems accord with rationally derived ethical systems through UPB. So yeah, I think that does work very well.
	Okay. Thanks.
	Alright, thanks, Ben. Alright.
	Good on ya. Good on ya, mate!
	You wouldn't believe the amount of children's movie lines I have in my head.
	It's sad and indicative of a truly bad media-based parenting style.
	We have a caller from the 401 area code up next.
	40 wonderful, I'd say.
	Hi, how can I help you? Yes, hello?
	Hello? Hi.
	Can you hear me?
	Go ahead. Oh, no.
	I sure can. Wow, this is actually my first time calling in.
	I've actually been a pretty new listener to the Free Domain Radio podcast.
	I started out on the YouTube channels and worked my way up to the actual website.
	And, you know, first off, before I ask my question, I just wanted to say, you know, I have a lot of admiration for the work that you're doing, and I feel like it's very important, and it kind of really clicked right away.
	Well, thank you. Yeah.
	I hope the donators are listening to this, too, because that's the only reason I'm able to do it.
	Sorry, go ahead. Well, my question is pretty much a relationship-based question.
	Right. I pretty much...
	I have been dating this girl for approximately about four months, and throughout my life, I kind of always felt like I made too much sense, if that makes any sense.
	I know, I hear you.
	I've always had a knack for kind of seeing things as they are and asking why.
	And I've always kind of opted out of the herd mentality when it comes to a lot of things.
	So I guess in my community I would be considered pretty weird.
	But back to what I wanted to ask, I've been dating this girl for about four months, and we had very, very similar backgrounds and we had very, very similar backgrounds as far as where we're from, family history, Just, like, ridiculously similar.
	You know, we're both from the same neighborhood, both, you know, actually doing something with our lives, you know, come from, you know, our urban life.
	I'm sorry to annoy you.
	I just want to make sure that we have enough time for the next caller.
	If you could just move to, let's assume that you're a smart guy, you're an independent thinker, because you're listening to this show and that there's a lot that you have in common, but what's the actual issue that I can help you with?
	So, my question is, Is it possible to open the eyes of other people around you?
	What would be the steps one would take to kind of get people on the same wavelength, if that's the case?
	Right. Right.
	So what you're saying is that you're Your girlfriend, if I understand this rightly, and tell me if I'm wrong, but your girlfriend is obviously a good person and a reasonable person, but she has not so far been challenged with the extension of, say, the non-aggression principle, which I'm sure she accepts in her personal life and her career and so on.
	She's not been challenged with that extension of it to, say, a social context.
	Is that right? Right, right, right.
	Well, first of all, you can't open somebody else's eyes.
	I mean, even physically, right?
	So I think if that's a metaphor you're working with, you can't open their eyes because that's their choice to open or close their eyes.
	So there's nothing you can do that's going to open somebody's eyes for sure.
	But there are things I think you can do which can make it more likely that they will be encouraged.
	So the best thing that I can think of is to To live your values yourself.
	Now, we assume, or at least I think we assume that, you know, that old equation, reason equals virtue equals happiness, that if we have rational values and we put them into action by being virtuous, that we're going to be happier.
	You can't exactly say happy because, unfortunately, the world is irrational to the point where being rational creates lots of problems, right?
	Like if you're not a racist in the Deep South in 1930, you have some social problems, right?
	Because everyone's like, hey, let's go lynch this black guy.
	And you're like, I don't really want to.
	And people are like, what do you mean you don't want to?
	And so when you are rational in an irrational environment, it's hard to say that reason simply breeds happiness.
	You know, like you're just happy, dum-de-dum, like there's no problems in your society or anything like that.
	So, that's one thing that I would sort of mention that there is going to be some limits to your happiness, but I do believe that it's better to be rational than to be irrational in the current world.
	So, I think if you simply are happy, then I think that people will be curious if they want to be happy and if they understand that something's missing from their happiness, right?
	Because it's really important to understand that, you know, people as a whole, they're not very happy, right?
	They're not very happy. What is it?
	One in ten Americans is on antidepressants and that doesn't even count all the people who are either suffering through it silently or who are not on medication but are pursuing some other form of hopefully more viable treatment like talk therapy or whatever.
	But there are druggies and alcoholics as James pointed out in the chat room.
	Yeah, there's a lot of violence in relationships.
	I mean, in England, 70 to 90% of parents hit their children.
	And I don't believe that hitting children is any path to anything other than guilt, shame, and misery.
	So I think that, and think of all the anxiety that people have, right?
	Caught in this terrible machinery of a quasi-fascistic, quasi-free market economy.
	Think of all the people in the public sector who know, know, sure as sunrise, that their employment opportunities are going to be cut.
	I mean, half a million government employees were laid off Last year alone, think of all of the people who were stuck on this, you know, getting up to 99 weeks of, that's almost two years of unemployment insurance.
	They're really, really stuck.
	Think of all the people who are on food stamps.
	What somebody's saying is at least 15% of the US population.
	Think of all the teachers who are stuck in really destructive work environments, or all the government workers, or all the people who are stuck in bad unions, or all the people, half of marriages fail.
	Think of the amount of misery that comes out of divorce.
	Think about the amount of misery that That people suffer in for years before they decide to take a major step like getting divorced.
	Think of all the unhappiness of the children who are stuck in divorced households and shuttling back and forth, if they're lucky, between parent to parent, if they even get to see the other parent at all.
	So, you know, think of all the people who were at war.
	Geez, those people aren't happy unless they're complete psychos.
	And think about all the people who are worried about all the people who were at war.
	And, I mean, think about the people who come home from war and how difficult it is for them to adjust.
	I mean, you could go on and on, right?
	But there's a lot of mystery in the world.
	And so if you're a happy person and it's not fake, right, it's genuine, then I think that you have a reasonable, you're going to have a reasonable curiosity from people.
	So be happy and be clear about your happiness.
	Be open about your happiness. And, yeah, somebody's written here, said, my parents' marriage was crappy.
	It died after five years, and they finally divorced after another five years.
	Oh, yeah. A divorce is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to misery.
	The effects go before and after, year after year after year.
	It's just a divorce is a huge catastrophe.
	So be happy and be clear and open about your happiness.
	And then you're like this, right?
	I've used this metaphor before, so I'll just touch on it briefly here.
	But then you're like this. So you're on a land, you're on an island where everybody weighs 400 pounds and you get down to 200 pounds.
	You can climb up to get the coconuts, you can swim with the dolphins, you can do cartwheels, you can dance on the sand, you can do the rumba and the limba and all these kinds of fun dances.
	And some people won't have any interest in doing that because they just want to, you know, stuff their face in the potato chip bowl.
	But some people will have an interest in doing that.
	And those people are going to say, "Wow, you seem to be pretty happy at 200 pounds.
	My knees hurt all the time.
	I'm short of breath. I can't climb the stairs.
	I wake up half the time like I can't breathe.
	I've got sleep apnea. They're going to say, I'd really like to know how you got down to 200 pounds.
	Those are the people you want to talk to.
	But there's no point being somebody who's 400 pounds lecturing other people who are 400 pounds that they need to lose weight.
	So the first thing you need to do is get yourself right, get yourself happy, get your unhappy fat off your body, so to speak.
	And then I think you're going to be a beacon for those people who get it and who want to.
	I don't think we're at the place yet where we can go chasing people around telling them to lose weight, but we can say, here's the life I have without all this extra weight.
	If you're interested, I'd be happy to share with you.
	It's not easy, but it's worth it.
	So would you say that is the answer to institutionalized unhappiness?
	Because it seems like just from that picture that that's what's going on in our society and the world as we live in.
	Everybody's just kind of caught up to unhappy is the norm and anything else is frightening and scary.
	Yeah, I do believe that.
	I really do believe that.
	Let me just take one second here to dig up some statistics.
	These statistics just came out about how much weight has increased in America.
	It really is quite astonishing.
	It's like, I think 10 or 15 years ago, there were no states with obesity above 20%.
	Now there's only two states with obesity below 20%, like significant obesity.
	Weight gain in the US has been just enormous.
	Now, you know, understand this is complete bullshit because I have no expertise in the field.
	So these are just my thoughts on the issue.
	I mean, I think there's lots that contribute.
	There's lots of stuff that contributes to weight gain.
	I think that kids are having less opportunity To run outside.
	I mean, when I was a kid, I mean, I was walking to school when I was seven or eight, and it was a long way to get to school.
	And I was just out all day and out all evening and riding bikes and playing football or soccer, as you call it here.
	And so I was just really, really active, and that's really run through or continued through my whole life.
	Just activity is the key.
	And... I think kids have left opportunity.
	I think a lot of schools have dropped gym now.
	We used to get like an hour every day or two at school.
	I think a lot of schools have cut that.
	I think the price for getting involved in sports has gone up.
	And I think as people's incomes have stagnated, it's become harder for parents to get their kids into sports.
	Certainly, there's more...
	There's more incentive to stay in because video games and movies and 45-mile flat-screen digital TVs are much more compelling than going outside and looking at trees, so there's sort of heightened competition there.
	Certainly, I think it's much harder for two parents working to organize sports for their kids than it is for one parent working.
	And I think that's also hard.
	Certainly, the injection of pretty weird, gross, artificial stuff as a result of government controls and subsidies like fructose, glucose into lots of kids' foods.
	It's hard, you know, as a parent.
	I mean, I won't let her eat that stuff.
	I won't let my daughter eat that stuff.
	It's really hard to find stuff that doesn't have that injected into the very atoms that compose the food.
	But I think more fundamentally, I think that the reason that obesity is increasing is because everybody is stressed out as shit because we live in end of empire times.
	Everybody knows that the system doesn't work.
	Everybody knows. I'm going to break into a Leonard Cohen song.
	Everybody knows.
	But everybody knows that the pillars of history are falling and we are directly in its line of shadow.
	And I think that creates a great deal of stress.
	Everybody knows that our current system is unsustainable.
	Everybody knows that money is about to vaporize.
	Everybody knows that oil is getting harder to find.
	Everybody knows. That environmental problems are increasing in many ways.
	Everybody knows that the system that we have fundamentally doesn't work and that there are storms coming our way.
	And the less people talk about it, the more they eat because they're stressed.
	And so I think that has a lot to do with it as well.
	And I think that's another indication of just how unhappy people are.
	Okay. So it's funny.
	So people kind of have this mentality of, I'm just going to stick my head in the sand and hope for the best.
	Yeah, I mean, it's just a way of avoiding it.
	And to some degree, that's rational, right?
	I mean, what can you do about the deficit?
	Well, not a whole hell of a lot, right?
	Except the stuff that I suggest around voluntarism and ostracism, and people find that even more stressful.
	And the other thing that's true is I think that as economic uncertainty increases, people feel less inclined to test their relationships based on merely abstract things like personal virtues.
	So, again, that's why I sort of said in a video the other day, like, I really understand why people don't want to push their relationships.
	They may consider it too late, and they might need their tribe when the shit hits the fan.
	So I can understand that. Yeah, I mean, there's a sort of rational ignorance to it, but it's really hard living in times.
	As disasters get more intense, the propaganda intensifies, and propaganda is an intense assault on sanity, right?
	And propaganda is an intense...
	Assault on sanity.
	And that is really, really hard for people to see because the more they see their sanity being assaulted, the more they see that they are in fact just taxed livestock and they have no respect for the people in power.
	So, yeah, I think people are having a pretty stressful and difficult and negative time of it.
	And, you know, people kind of sold their soul to the devil, right?
	I mean, they gave up their children for the sake of having a career and now they found that You know, they didn't have that time with their kids.
	Their career hasn't turned out the way that they wanted to, right?
	Because all that happened was they went into a job and they were encouraged to go into a job by groups funded by the government, feminists and other groups, so that they could be taxed because the work that they were doing at home wasn't taxed.
	You get people to go into the workforce.
	You substitute cheap-ass labor for the intimacy and warmth and care of a primary caregiver, usually a mom.
	And so they went out, and they had their career, and they missed out on their kids' lives.
	We were out of town a little while ago, and we were at a playground.
	Actually, no, it was just Izzy and I, actually.
	It was just Izzy and I were at a playground out of town.
	And I was chatting with some parents as Izzy was playing with their kids for just like about a minute or two.
	And they were telling me, oh yeah, you know, we drop our kids off at daycare at 7.30 in the morning.
	We pick them up at 6 o'clock at night.
	And this was at about 7 o'clock.
	And there were two three-and-a-half-year-old kids who were playing there.
	And they were playing with Izzy.
	And we were, I was playing with them.
	We were playing hide-and-go-seek and a game that Izzy called, because what happens is I sort of go up and go, and I sort of chase the kids around in sort of a very primordial panther-like way.
	And we were playing that. And then Izzy's really interested in culverts at the moment, so we went down, we found some culverts, and I told them a story of someone in a culvert, and then we sang some songs.
	And the whole time, this was close to an hour that I was playing with Izzy and these two other kids.
	And the whole time, the parents were just talking.
	And I was like, but you just drop your kids off in the morning.
	They're gone for hours, like...
	What, 11 or 12 hours?
	And then you go to the park and you're not playing with them.
	Like, I don't get it. I don't get it.
	Why do you have these children? But, yeah, so, you know, people, I think, are now looking back and saying, well, you know, my career's kind of stalled if I'm even lucky enough to have a job.
	I was lured away from my kids, and so I don't have that same intimacy with them.
	And, you know, things are pretty miserable.
	I mean, the devil will tempt you with everything that feels good in the moment, and then only afterwards do you realize what the price is.
	And I think it's just heartbreaking the degree to which people have become, so many people have become so distant from their kids as a result of a fairly artificially stimulated ambition.
	Okay. Well, I have a couple more questions, but I'll have to wait to, you know, left bivy.
	Hey, we're on every week, man.
	You are always welcome back.
	Those are great questions, and I hope that things work out with us.
	With your girlfriend. But yeah, slow and steady and remember that it's really, really hard to pop out of the matrix.
	So, you know, be gentle and be slow and don't overwhelm her and I hope that she will wake up in the way that works for you and if it's too intense for her, you know, back off for a little bit and so on.
	But it's the direction, not the speed that counts, I think.
	Thank you.
	All right.
	Thanks.
	Caller from the 412 area code.
	You're up.
	Do you mean 214?
	That's good. We are doing the 4s this week, so this works out well.
	How are you doing, man? Do you mean 214 area code?
	Yes, that's me. Can you hear me?
	I sure can. How are you doing, Stefan?
	I'm very well. How are you doing? I've got two lightning quick comments before I get into what I wanted to talk about.
	One is a small world story.
	I recently moved in with a new roommate, and one of my roommates is always on I was sitting out there, listening to her, chatting with one of her friends, and the voice sounded really familiar.
	And after about 15 minutes, I realized that it was Jake from True Transmissions.
	So, I thought that was pretty funny.
	Oh, is that right? That's funny.
	The second thing is, I'd like to add myself to the list of...
	I forget how you... Shit miserable people or something, because despite having a master's degree in mathematics, I'm working at a Taco Bell today, which I actually left crying today because that reality hit me.
	Oh, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry.
	First of all, because you have a master's degree in mathematics, I already feel inferior and intimidated, just so you know, because I have a bit of a math phobia.
	But no, I must say, I find mathematics to be one of these arcane sciences that really, really impresses me.
	It's like people who can just pick up languages, which I'm not very good at, except computer languages.
	So I just wanted to say that is really impressive to me.
	I think that is a really hard thing to do.
	So good for you, and I'm so sorry about where you've ended up.
	But please go on. You don't need to feel...
	I'm impressed or anything.
	Instead of all of those skills, I wish I had more people skills and that kind of thing.
	You're going to love my next question because it's kind of mathematical.
	I just peed myself a little bit.
	Go on. I'll walk it off.
	Back in February of 2009, we did the infamous determinist free will debate.
	I wrote up a little response that I had to that.
	I'm not going to read the whole thing, but I had some comments that have been pitching at me ever since then.
	Please do. I'm sorry? Yeah, please go ahead.
	So I'm either a determinist or a free will advocate.
	I just don't know.
	I think it's a kind of subjective thing that we may or may not ever know.
	But there were a couple of ideas that never got brought up in the conversation.
	I'd like to bring them up and just put them out there.
	There are two ideas that I think are relevant to the whole issue.
	One is the idea of correspondence, and by that I mean the correspondence that exists, for example, between an actual geographic region and that region on a map, or correspondence between a prediction of whatever, whether it be weather or a physics thing, to the reality that's observed.
	The second concept Sorry, I just want to make sure I get the first one because, you know, go slow with me here because this is somewhat new language for me.
	So correspondence would be I have a prediction about the way a balloon is going to either float out or float down based on whether it has oxygen or helium with it and the correspondence is between my theory and whether the balloon floats up and down.
	Is that right? Okay, got it.
	Hey, look at that first try.
	I feel like I've got a degree already, but sorry, go on.
	An A on your first quiz. Okay, so the second concept is a method of interacting with something.
	So, for example, drinking has the method of...
	I'm sorry, water has the method of drinking.
	You can drink it. That makes sense to drink, you know, water.
	It doesn't make sense to drink steel, for instance.
	At least not too much then.
	So... You were talking about the sort of Boulder analogy.
	If Boulder was rolling down a hill, and you had some notion of which way it should go, and you started yelling at it, like, you know, go left, go left, go right, go right.
	Like, you said that that would be basically insane for criticizing which way it goes, because...
	And trust me, I'd done that several times to see if it worked or not because I thought, man, if this works, I've got a whole different kind of show that I can probably take on the road to Vegas, get showgirls, flashpots, electric bunnies, the whole thing.
	So I had tested this a number of times and just got swamped with boulders.
	So I was taking it very personally.
	I figured you had. I figured you'd try that.
	But see, the thing that you said was that the insanity of doing that came from the fact that That there is no right or wrong way for a boulder to go.
	You said it's insane because there's not a right or wrong way for it to go.
	Well, and you can't change it.
	Because its path is determined by physics.
	And that doesn't mean that we know where it's going to land, but we know that our yelling at it isn't going to make any difference, right?
	I agree with that. I just wanted to clarify that because it seems like you were saying it doesn't make sense because there's not a right or wrong way for the boulder to go.
	But... The problem is really that it's not a rational method of interacting with a boulder.
	Like yelling or talking are rational methods for interacting between people because it can produce an effect.
	They can tell them what you're saying. Yeah, and it's only rational, but it's only rational, just to be clear, it's only rational if we accept that there is a right and wrong way A right to run things for people to believe and that our talking is going to have an effect.
	Those are the two things that are necessary.
	Neither of those are present in a rock, right?
	So a rock falling down, and this is not for you, you understand, but just for other people who haven't seen the debate.
	So a rock falling down a hillside, there's no right or wrong way for it to land.
	Now we may prefer that it doesn't land on our car, but there is no morally right.
	We don't sort of put it in jail for vandalizing our car if it lands on our We know that its path is predetermined, that the rock has no choice about where it's going to land.
	And also we understand that our interacting with the rock verbally is not going to do anything.
	And so those are the two things.
	And those two things are not present if we're having a debate with another human being.
	Another human being, by having a debate and attempting to correct the other person's erroneous beliefs, we're saying there's such a thing as truth and falsehood, right and wrong.
	It's better to believe things that are true than to believe things that are untrue.
	And also that our verbal interactions are going to have an effect on the other person.
	Not for certain, but, you know, certainly they have some effects, right?
	So I just wanted to clarify that for other people who are listening.
	Yeah, I think some of those statements you just made were, I think, not present in the debate before.
	But that's kind of the key point that I wanted to address.
	You said there's no right and wrong way for a boulder to roll down the hill.
	And, of course, like, ethically there's not.
	But I think... You need to be careful about how you define right and wrong, because whether it's ethics or a physical prediction, right and wrong, I think, depend on that first idea that I brought up, which is correspondence.
	Something is right, whether it's a physical phenomenon or an ethical situation, if it corresponds to the framework or the theory that we have for it.
	So, if it's a personal interaction, then It's right if it corresponds to UPB. And if it's a physical situation, then I would say the right way for a boulder to fall would be one that is in line with our theory.
	And in that case, if it fell differently, it wouldn't be the boulder that was wrong, but the theory that was wrong.
	Right, right. So I think we agree on that.
	Certainly, since you've mentioned UPB in a positive light, I'm a slave to your every whim, so please go on.
	That's pretty much all I had to say.
	The reason that yelling at a boulder is wrong is because boulders don't respond, whereas we do.
	Well, look, I agree with you.
	No, I agree with you, but that is embedded in the question of determinism versus free will.
	So for instance, if you yell at a rain cloud, the rain cloud in a sense does change based on you yelling at it insofar as you're expelling some breath and some volume that's going to affect where the raindrops are falling in your immediate vicinity or at least in the immediate vicinity in front of your mouth or whatever, right? So that is having some effect.
	The argument really is that, you know, the question I always have about determinism is, I'm not expecting you to answer it, and of course unless you want to, is I have a great deal of difficulty with beliefs that don't seem to make any difference to people, right?
	So what I always, I'm not saying you're a determinist, but what I always want to ask determinists, and I have asked this many, many times, is, okay, so what changes when you become a determinist, right?
	So if I become an anarchist, then what changes?
	Well, um...
	I no longer accept the validity of the state, and so I have to make debates against the state, and there's a whole sort of thing.
	If I become an atheist, what's the behavior that changes?
	Well, I no longer go to church, you know, unless it is to try and get other people to give up their illusions or whatever.
	I don't pray anymore, and I don't expect there to be things after death.
	I don't read the Bible except as literature, and so on, right?
	So there are things that change if you have particular beliefs.
	And somebody who believes that, you know, alcoholism is really destructive, should I, you know, probably one of the results of that will be that they're not an alcoholic, or at least not anymore, or that they're not married to an alcoholic or whatever.
	So, do beliefs change actions?
	Do they change behavior? And my sort of, if a determinist says to me, Steph, you are a complex system whose inputs and outputs are all predetermined, Well, that's fine.
	Okay, I mean, I can accept that as a definition.
	In other words, I am weather.
	I am the wind.
	I am the weather. I am the weather.
	You know, we don't know exactly what the weather's going to do.
	We have some general ideas, but we don't know exactly what the weather's going to do.
	But the fact that it's complex does not grant it free will.
	And so, if somebody's defining me as the weather, then the first thing they should do is stop debating me, because you don't debate with the weather, right?
	Because there's no point, because the weather is just going to do what the weather's going to do.
	And so... Yeah, please.
	Even though, you know, if we're just complex beings who don't have free will, if we're deterministic, like you said, talking amongst each other, or yelling or whatever, still has an effect on each other.
	And even if the world is deterministic, we don't know any difference.
	Like, we can't tell if there's free will or determinism.
	So I think in either case, the discussion that goes on between us still makes sense.
	And that's really all I had to say.
	Well, no, but except that there are certain things that are implicit in debating, right?
	That if you're going to have a debate, then you have to debate.
	Sorry, then you have to accept the premises of a debate.
	Otherwise, you are rejecting...
	So, I mean, for instance, to take an example I've used before, if I say to you, I, Steph, am incomprehensible, right?
	Then either you've understood what I've said, in which case I am comprehensible, right?
	Or you have not understood what I've said, in which case I know that I'm incomprehensible and therefore why would I try to communicate to you that I am incomprehensible, right?
	So if I just said...
	Right? Then you wouldn't know what I meant other than I perhaps needed to pee.
	So if I say to you I am incomprehensible, I am using the assumption of comprehensibility to communicate that I am incomprehensible.
	And of course that just doesn't work fundamentally.
	If I say nothing is true, I'm using the statement of truth to say that nothing is true.
	You understand. These are obvious examples.
	Now, if people believe in determinism, then any debate is fundamentally identical.
	To two rain clouds crashing into each other, right?
	Yeah, they have an effect on each other, no question.
	It's called lightning and thunder and all the other things that make me hide under the bed, right?
	So, now, if we see two rain clouds crashing into each other, we do not call that a debate, right?
	Because neither one of them is right or wrong.
	Neither one of them can verbally interact with and affect each other.
	And so, if If determinists wish to define human beings as rain clouds, which is what determinism fundamentally is, well that's fine.
	Then don't debate with a rain cloud and don't say that there's anything true or false about the directional pattern of a rain cloud and certainly don't attempt to interact with a rain cloud and change it through language.
	That just wouldn't make any sense because it's just two rain clouds crashing into each other.
	And so my question to determinists is, okay, I should never ever hear about determinism.
	I should never hear about it because in the same way that a rain cloud never hears a debate about whether rain clouds are good or bad because nobody sits there, nobody gets a big ladder, climbs up to a rain cloud and says, you know, I have some problems with you because I just watered my lawn and now you're raining and I have to pay for that water, which I didn't need to use anyway.
	That is incredibly inconsiderate.
	And can I talk to your mother, please, because I just don't think you've been taught well.
	I mean, we would look at that as the actions of a crazy person, right?
	I mean, that would be bad comedy.
	And this is what determinism is.
	If I'm a rain cloud, then treat me like a rain cloud and stop talking to me.
	I don't mean you, right? But just the argument...
	Well, I don't want to be upset or anything, but I just...
	And you see like a slight disagreement with that.
	And the disagreement that I have is that rain clouds don't have, as far as we know, different degrees of happiness.
	And if we could determine whether...
	The universe is more deterministic or free will.
	That might affect the kind of decisions that we make, and that might affect the degrees of happiness that everyone experiences in the future.
	Ah, but you see, you've just introduced an enormous brain dump of fudge into the equation, which, you know, I understand.
	But you said more deterministic or more free will.
	But it's binary, right?
	It's binary. If we have 1% of free will, then free will exists, right?
	It is a binary equation, at least according to the people.
	Because look, I recognize there's a huge amount of stuff that is determined.
	I mean... Do I believe that my gender has nothing to do with my way of thinking?
	Well, of course it does. I imagine that it's largely a social construct, but so what?
	It still is, right? The fact that I'm a white male, does that have anything to do with my experience of the world?
	Of course. I didn't choose any of those things.
	The fact that I was not born with cystic fibrosis, does that have any effect on...
	Of course it does. That's not a choice that I've made, right?
	So I completely...
	I mean, this is just one of 10 billion things you could talk about, right?
	My genetics, my epigenetics, all of the things that Did I choose the family I was born into?
	Did that have an effect? Of course it did.
	But, so I accept that the world is, you know, you could even say largely predetermined.
	I mean, the fact that I was born in the privileged West as opposed to Zimbabwe.
	I mean, good lord, how lucky can you get, right?
	And so, I agree with you that there's huge amounts of determinism within the world and that we should not That it is actually, I think, very destructive and abusive to ascribe to free will things which are unchosen and accidental.
	That's like saying to some poor black kid, born to, you know, some welfare mom, to take a cliche, some welfare mom in a ghetto, that that's exactly the same as, you know, me, Steph, the white male who went to a pretty privileged white boarding school.
	I wasn't white, but it was functionally white, you know, when I was six or eight and has had the opportunity to live in a wide variety of countries and who has a fairly good head on his shoulders and so on.
	It's not fair because then that person feels like crap and I feel unjustly vain for all of the positive circumstances that I was accidentally exposed to.
	So I agree with you that there's a huge amount of destructive problems with extending To choice that which is actually circumstantial.
	But the free will versus determinism question itself, and I think most determinists would agree with me on this, not that they would view it as agreeing, but rather just bumping into my rain cloud.
	That does sound like a good song about determinism bumping into my rain cloud.
	Rap with me, sister! Anyway.
	But I would say that they would say there's none.
	No free will. As soon as any free will comes in, then we're no longer in a determinist universe.
	Well, great. Thanks. I now have peace on the matter.
	Now that I've... Excellent.
	Until you talk to your next determinist and then we'll talk again because it's a challenging topic and I really appreciate you bringing it up.
	Well, thanks for talking to me. You've frightened my day a little bit.
	Thank you. I appreciate that.
	And listen, if you ever want to call in and talk about your unhappiness, I think that would be a well worthwhile topic.
	I really don't think that you're alone in it.
	I think there are some things that philosophy can do.
	With regards to unhappiness, and I don't want to pretend that you didn't say that, because that's a very, very important thing, and more important than free will versus determinism.
	So if you ever want to talk about that, just drop me a line.
	Thank you very much. You're very welcome.
	Correction time. I said in my interview with Jeffrey Tucker, or in my conversation with Jeffrey Tucker, and I apologize for this, I even at the time was not even, I was pretty sure that it was wrong, but I didn't want to stop, that I said, Aeschylus, As far as the guy who had the wax wings and was going up and he got them fried off by the sun and fell down and all of this kind of stuff.
	I said that in...
	Let me just make sure I get the name right again.
	This, right? So I meant Icarus.
	So I said Aeschylus, but I meant Icarus.
	It was close and it would be a bad rhyme, but that wasn't quite correct.
	I also did not correct Adam Kokesh just because of the flow of the show.
	I didn't want to interrupt him at that time, but there is a correction in the last time that I was on Adam vs.
	as the man.
	He talked about that Richard Nixon was giving his speech at the Bohemian Grove, which launched his presidential ambitions in 1971.
	This is not true.
	Nixon went into power, I believe it was 1969, because by 1971, he'd already taken America off the gold standard.
	So thank you for the people.
	I think I checked the Aeschylus thing right afterwards because I'm like, damn, that was close, but I don't think that was quite right.
	So I apologize for that.
	And thank you for the people who wrote and said, dude, what the hell do you know?
	You know, it's funny. It's almost like this.
	I mean, some people are very nice about it, but a lot of people are like, ah, what do you know?
	I can't believe if I can't trust you on this, how can I trust you on anything?
	Right? So anyway, people can be a little bit calmer about the errors that I make because I will always strive to give better information and correct them.
	So, if you want to type a last question in, we have a couple of minutes before the end of the show.
	And thank you. Yeah, thanks, James.
	Thanks, James, as always. And thank you to all the callers today.
	Oh, my God. Being any part of this hive brain is really, really just astounding.
	And it is really, really a great honor that people share their thoughts with me to this degree.
	And I really, really do appreciate it.
	And I hope that people will keep doing it.
	Because it's sort of important that this conversation keep going, I think.
	I'm just going to scroll back a little bit here and see if I missed any other questions.
	Free will versus determinism is the medal round at the philosophy Olympics.
	That's right. It's the people with the most noodley arms you could ever imagine.
	Somebody emailed me this from the European FDR group and said, have you ever found anybody who had a hard time with UPB and then figured it out eventually?
	Yes. I think that would be everybody.
	And that would be including me.
	And so I think that's really, really important to remember.
	UPB is a mofo of an approach.
	And it's also important to remember that...
	Let's see, there's two things I want to clarify.
	Yeah, so UPB can refer to three things, and I don't know how to solve it.
	When I do UPB Part 2, I will definitely work on this.
	But UPB can refer to the book.
	UPB can refer to the framework.
	The framework of UPB, in other words, how you analyze moral theories, and UPB can also refer to the theories which are validated by the framework.
	So if that seems confusing, let me see if I can clear it up.
	So let's say I'm Francis Bacon in the 16th century, and I write a book called The Scientific Method.
	And the scientific...
	No, I write a book called Science.
	I write a book called Science.
	And then people start using the word science.
	Are they referring to the book? Are they referring to science, i.e.
	the scientific... Method, the theory by which you validate scientific hypotheses, or are they referring to hypotheses which at least have been tentatively validated according to the scientific method?
	So UPB falls into that category.
	I don't know exactly how to solve it.
	UPB A, B, C, I don't know.
	That's a pretty crappy way of doing it.
	I will try and figure something out.
	If you have any good ideas, please let me know.
	But that is the challenge.
	But I still really do want to write the UPB checklist, and I will get down to that.
	I'm just pretty busy at the moment doing a couple of other projects and still working off and on on a new book, so all of these kinds of things.
	Yeah, no, it has...
	We haven't had, I don't know, determinism?
	Somebody wrote, I've been trying to catch up on podcasts.
	You were talking about it in every call-in show from 2006 that I've heard so far.
	Yes, determinism. It has been quite some time since we've had a chat about determinism.
	Oh, I remember what I wanted to talk about.
	Sorry, we just got a little bit over. Oh yeah, somebody said, it's very weird to listen to old podcasts and new ones at the same time.
	I feel like I have five years of listening to do before I can ask a question.
	No, don't feel that.
	I mean, feel that if you want, but hopefully that won't dictate your behavior.
	I want people who are just starting out in the podcast to feel perfectly and completely free to talk about subjects without having to plow through every podcast.
	Philosophy, this show in particular, this Sunday show, the Sunday show is about your questions.
	Don't feel like the kid in the advanced physics class asking why helium balloons go up.
	This is not what it is. This is not a graduation situation.
	And this is the challenge, of course, of this show.
	There's people who've got lots of experience in philosophy.
	They've listened to lots of these shows or other shows or taken it in school or whatever.
	But this show is about your questions.
	Your questions. I want to hear your questions.
	And it doesn't matter. I mean, we just had a great chat about determinism.
	I enjoyed it. And yes, I've talked about it till I'm hoarse.
	Nay! Sometimes. It's about your questions.
	Don't feel like you have to hold off or don't feel like, well, maybe this has been covered before or whatever.
	Just ask your questions.
	This show is live. This show is for you.
	This show is for you to get a few words in and then for me to go on endless rants that put you to sleep.
	No, wait. No, wait.
	Sorry. Let me read my mission statement.
	No, that is my mission statement. So actually that fits really nicely.
	But no, please feel free to call in.
	There are no dumb questions.
	There are only questions. No, there are no dumb questions.
	And I really, really want to.
	If it's important to you, I mean, this sounds cheesy, but it genuinely is what I believe.
	If the question is important to you, it is important to me.
	And if the question is important to you, it may never have been dealt with in the podcast.
	It may have been dealt with badly in the podcast or unsatisfactorily to you.
	And you may have to wait for another year, even if you're plowing through one or two a day, before you get to anything that's of use to you.
	Don't spend that year without your question being at least attempted to be answered by me or by others on the message board.
	So please, please, if you have a question that's nagging at you, drop it into the Skype Borg brain and let's see what we can come up with as helpful approaches.
	So I hope that you won't feel inhibited about calling in.
	There was a – oh, yeah.
	Sorry.
	Do I have any plans to reach out to the skeptical community?
	I listened to the Skeptic Guide to the Universe and it's great fun.
	I think their approach to reality is quite similar to yours.
	I have no problems reaching out to the skeptic community.
	My time is largely parenting and whatever it is that I'm producing.
	I mean, I think the output has been pretty good this year.
	Two books, I think, and quite a lot of podcasts and some pretty good public speaking.
	And so with the sort of travel for public speaking and conferences and putting out the books, we've upgraded the website and that was mostly the technical team.
	And, you know, put out a couple of books.
	I don't have time for a lot of outreach at the moment.
	So, but, you know, don't leave it up to me.
	If you feel that there's a good venue for me to talk to or talk into, please, just send them an email.
	I mean, be proactive. That would be my suggestion.
	Send them an email and say that here's a guy who loves to talk and it might fit.
	And, you know, just copy me on it if you want, host at freedomainradio.com.
	And, you know, I'm very happy to chat to the skeptical community.
	I think that we have a lot in common.
	And I chat to Christians.
	I'm happy to talk to socialist atheists.
	I'm happy to talk to anyone who might be open to reason.
	Somebody wrote, when you write UPB, can you change up the style?
	I'd really like it written in a more straightforward, clear style.
	I feel like there was a lot of fluff compared to other works I've read in philosophy, yours included.
	Yes, well, I'm not going to...
	I'm going to start from scratch.
	So hopefully that will be more to your liking and more to your satisfaction.
	I certainly accept that as criticism and I will certainly work to improve the style.
	I'm not going to give you any of my cheesy excuses as to why it was written the way it is.
	I've certainly heard that criticism and I think it's very valid.
	So I will definitely try to improve it in the next round.
	Oh yeah, so there was, I can't remember who wrote it, but somebody wrote that on the message board, and it went something like this, and I'll just sort of try and clear this bit up.
	Also, if you're listening, if you could mute, I'm getting a little bit of feedback, that would be really, really helpful.
	Somebody wrote that if there's an action that is virtuous, then the opposite of that action Must be immoral.
	So if action A is good, then action opposite A must be evil.
	I mean, I sort of stand by that.
	And I think the example that was given was, so if not murdering is virtuous, like if murder is evil, then the opposite of murder must be virtuous.
	And I think that's fairly good.
	I think that's fairly good.
	Now, does that mean that you are the summit of virtue every time you don't kill someone or every day you go by where you don't kill someone?
	Well, I think there's some room to argue for that.
	So if you look at all of the things that are in UPB that are, I think, rationally justified as immoral, in other words, the moral theories cannot be logically sustained, that advocate them.
	So if you look at rape and assault, murder and theft.
	So if we simply were to eliminate the major immoralities from people's individuals and, of course, their political lives, which means there would be no such thing as a political life because there'd be no taxation, no government and so on.
	So we'd not have any initiation of force against children.
	There would be no spanking.
	There would be no hitting.
	There would be nothing like that.
	There would be no governments.
	There would be no war, of course, because there'd be no initiation of force.
	There would be respect for property rights and, therefore, there would be no theft and all the overhead associated with theft would vanish, right?
	So security and Insurance and police and night watchmen and security guards and video cameras and all that kind of crap would be released to generally productive areas within society.
	That would be a paradise the likes of which we could scarcely imagine at the moment.
	So I think that is something really, really important.
	That if you live a life where you're not initiating force...
	Where you're doing all of the stuff that conforms to UPB, respecting property rights, not initiating force, basically.
	That's a pretty good life.
	Now, are you striving for every piece of conceivable virtue and doing even all the aesthetically preferable actions?
	Well, I think that's icing on the cake, right?
	So if you're honest and you use RTR and do aesthetically preferable actions like being on time and all that kind of stuff and treating people as well as you can, certainly the first time you interact with them.
	Then I think that's icing on the cake.
	And I think that's good stuff.
	But I'm happy to live in a world where people just deal with respect for property rights and the non-initiation of force.
	That transition would already be a miraculously virtuous world compared to what we have now.
	So I think that's sort of very, very important.
	But there is an interesting thing where if we say that murder is virtuous, then everything that is the opposite of murder...
	Is evil. And what that is, is that casts a very wide net.
	So if murder is virtuous and everything that's the opposite of murder is evil, then picking your nose is as evil as stubbing your toe, as climbing a set of stairs, as going to the disco.
	These are all evil because they're not murder.
	And I think that's fair.
	And I think I sort of made a note to clarify that further in the book for the next round, which is that, of course, that is one of the ways in which we know that murder cannot be virtuous.
	And this is why, in general, positive actions cannot be...
	Sorry.
	Yeah, positive actions cannot be good, because then every time you refrain from them, you're evil.
	Right?
	So murder is, it cannot be virtuous because then you're evil for not doing it.
	And of course, there's lots of other reasons why murder can't be virtuous, which is that it can't be done by Bob and Doug in the same room at the same time and so on.
	You can't both be murdering each other because that requires, if Bob's going to murder Doug, then Doug has to not want to be killed.
	Otherwise it's euthanasia and not murder.
	And so it's both good and bad at the same time since he has to want it and then not want it simultaneously He has to want it to the point because he wants to do good, but he has to not want it because he has to not want it in order for it to be murder and so on.
	So there's all these kinds of things that help us to understand it.
	And that's why positive actions can be evil, i.e.
	stabbing someone or whatever, because then when you're not stabbing someone, you're acting in a good way, acting in a virtuous way.
	You're respecting people's property and you're respecting people's person.
	You're not initiating the use of force.
	That's a good thing to do. So I think that's very, very important to understand.
	It's just another example of why you can't say that some particular positive action is virtuous.
	Some particular specific positive action is virtuous.
	And I think that's fairly well dealt with in UPB through the coma test.
	So if murder is virtuous, then a sleeping man is by definition evil.
	And that doesn't make any sense.
	You can't have a sleeping man be evil.
	So you can't take a specific positive action And make it the good, right?
	Because then it fails the coma test, which is another standard or test within UBB. So I hope that helps.
	I know that this stuff sometimes seems to clarify less than it helps, but I think that's an approach.
	All right. Well, thank you.
	It always seems to fly by.
	I hope it flies by for you. It certainly does fly by for me.
	But I really wanted to say thank you again to everybody so much for your trust and your support.
	And your enthusiasm about philosophy.
	This is truly an amazing conversation to be part of, and I hope that you find it as useful as I do.
	And I just really want to encourage everybody to continue this self-knowledge and virtue and all that kind of stuff.
	I have some great listener conversations to come out.
	I just posted one to Google+.
	I also wanted to remind people, I know this is all business that's coming at the end, but I just wanted to remind people that I am We got like, I don't know, over 30,000 YouTube subscribers, which is great, and there can be more.
	Please help by supporting that if you can.
	But I'm out of Facebook slots.
	As an individual, I can only have up to 5,000, and I ran...
	I blew past it some time back, so if you send me Facebook requests, I can accept them because of the limitation of that.
	But if you go to...
	I don't think I've set this up, but I'll set it up by the time you hear this.
	On the podcast feed...
	But there is a Free Domain Radio Facebook page, which I'm going to start using a lot more of.
	So that can be any number of people.
	So let me just get that for you.
	I'm going to post that in the chat room.
	But please give that a shot because I'm posting podcast previews and other kind of goodies there as well.
	And so if you go there and you become a fan of that and...
	Then you can get your feeds through that way, but I'm afraid I'm just out of slots for my personal Facebook account.
	So, alright, well that's it for me.

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